The remediation of soil contaminated by hazardous materials is an important environmental goal. In particular, remediation of contaminated sites removes from the local community a source of hazardous waste, and reclaims that land for a beneficial use. Consequently, the process of remediation is an important and valuable tool for land management, and its use has grown substantially in the United States.
However, as beneficial as remediation is, the process itself has some inherent risks. In particular, hazardous materials are present at the remediation site, which, although dangerous in themselves, are often in a stable form and if left untouched present a low risk to the surrounding community. Remediation often requires the removal of the contaminated materials from the remediation site causing subsurface soils to be disturbed. These subsurface soils may contain any number of hazardous materials that are easily made airborne, including volatile and semi-volatile organic compounds (VOC and SVOC), such as benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH). The release of VOCs and SVOCs from remediation sites provides a risk of toxicity to the surrounding community, and the disturbance of soil containing these materials can cause ambient air quality to degrade substantially. Once released to the ambient air, these compounds are free to move away from the remediation site and into the local community based on prevailing meteorological conditions.
Although systems exist today for measuring air quality, these systems are generally just stand alone air sampling devices that typically are only employed once an air quality problem is suspected. Accordingly, these systems are generally reactionary, only providing information regarding the damage done.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have a real time system for monitoring the quality of air leaving a remediation site to prevent or reduce public health risks to surrounding communities associated with on-site activities.